How Translation Works, Book Title Edition

Perhaps my favorite subtitle mistake of all time is in the subtitles of Brooklyn 99. One of the characters talks about getting someone a "boogie board" (a small surfboard) as a present. This is translated as "electronic memo pad". I couldn't work out how that had happened until I googled "boogie board" and half of the results are for an electronic writing pad with that name.

I've worked in an international environment where technical conferences were common and where both speakers and audience members were from various countries. Whilst almost everyone had a smattering of English many speakers chose to speak in their native languages so they would not be misinterpreted because of their limited second-language skills. Thus conferences had to be equipped with simultaneous interpretation and numbers of interpreters who translated on-the-fly into several different languages, English being the most common one with both native English and foreign language speakers doing the translations. A similar arrangement applied to other languages.

What impressed me greatly is how very competent these translators are, especially so given that presentations were usually of a technical nature and that they were translating in real time. They had precious little time to think of context let alone time to 'beautify' the translation into idiomatic or technical English (I only wish I was that competent in just one foreign language).

One doesn't expect interpreters to be expert in every technical term or jargon of a specialist technical subject so occasionally some phrase or term would be translated in the literal sense of the words instead of the more usual lingo/jargon that we professionals use in English but that never mattered as the meaning was always clear.

Moreover, many technical words are similar across a number of languages so it's often easy to get the gist of what's said in a language at the same instant the translator is translating them. For instance, I've a smattering of French and German so I'd recognized some of those words from those languages without translation.

Even with limited second-language skills I'm acutely aware of the limitations of translations. I have several different translations of a few important works and it's very instructive to compare their differences. This is very evident when one compares differences in emphasis and phraseology between various translators, and it's even more so if one is able to read the original text—even if one has to struggle to comprehend it.

What's immediately obvious from comparisons is how difficult it is to convey the full meaning and feeling of a work over to its translation. Good translators not only have to be fluent in both languages but they also must be able to convey spirit of the original with empathy and feeling into the translation. In fact, I'm often surprised how accurate and sympathetic translations are to the original text given that often there are very different constructs between languages, it's a testament to how very skillful many of them are.

Still, when one has only the translation and nothing else to reference it to one must always be wary of the accuracy of the translated text. I've also some books that are translations from Classical Greece that fall into this category such as those translated by the 19th C. classicist Benjamin Jowett. As I've almost no understanding of Ancient Greek I can only go on Jowett's reputation that his translations are faithful to the texts. Of course, translations are always a second-best but unfortunately most of us don't have enough skills to do without them.

BTW, if one's not familiar with the difficulties of translating languages then considerable insight can be gleaned from a short and amusing piece titled The Awful German Language written by Mark Twain—it's Appendix D to his work The Tramp Aboard. Therein, he describes his experience learning German and some of what he deems as its peculiarities.

Nevertheless, he rightly explains how some German words aptly convey human emotions and feelings in ways that are more effective and suited to the task than their English equivalents. What he's saying in this context is that a translator must be skilled enough to craft and tailor the transition into English so as to not lose the full meaning and feeling of the German text. It's highly a recommended read and there are many copies of it on the internet.

(I'd add it's a shame Twain didn't write one about English. English is a damn awkward language with odd inconsistencies and many peculiar spellings that often drive native speakers to despair. All up, I'd reckon English would leave German in the dust for odd rules and exceptions. Any foreign-language readers who read this then you have my most sincere sympathies).

> Properly prompted LLMs yield much better results and are already helping human translators produce better translations than they could on their own.

I'm curious what sorts of prompts can replicate this. Again, there's a lot I've missed in the decade or so that I've been out of the industry. Does translation memory now become part of the context window? Does the context window self-actualize with new translations? What sorts of prompts can help produce quality translations?

So if business emails gets creative and dramatic, there will be heightened need for resources and risk for mistranslations, or if a novel would be written like law text, there will be less ambiguity or processing cost. Or if were to be written relying on English-centric LLM, it'll do worse in languages other than en_AI.